Romania’s minister of health, Alexandru Rafila, recently revealed the plan to attract qualified medical personnel from countries from beyond European Union (EU) in order to cover the current deficit of doctors in Romania.
The minister announced a new residency exam in the spring in order to fill the remaining vacancies in hospitals across Romania during an interview with public TV station TVR Info.
„I would like to organize a new residency exam this spring for the remaining unoccupied places. There are several hundred places that were not filled out [during the past] residency exam. In family medicine, almost 90% of the places made available were filled, but in others – in emergency medicine, for example – very few were filled”, the minister stated.
„We need to make emergency medicine attractive. There is a personnel crisis in the ambulance services and in the emergency reception units, and we must find a solution so that the human resources strategy provides enough personnel”, he added.
Romania will host a regional meeting of 53 states that are part of the World Health Organization in March 2023. Participants will discuss problems related to human resources in health and the certification of medical personnel from countries other than those part of the EU.
In the summer, the president of Romania’s college of physicians told HotNews that one of the major problems regarding human resources in the health services sector is that half of the country’s doctors are concentrated in several major cities, leaving hospitals in the rest of the country understaffed.
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